Valerean

My third lot of brooches arrived, and are much nicer than I expected. I'm already seeing a little art quilt for Kat with this delicate pin. I wish we could bring back the brooch as wearable jewelry, but I haven't seen a woman wearing these since my teens. Bit of trivia about me: I used to wear flashy brooches on the lapels on my padded-shoulder jackets all the time in the eighties. It was a thing for a while. Oh, well. Making them into art is almost as much fun.

I took this pics to show my kid, but since we've had a lot of growth in our gardens I thought I'd share them with you, too. The strawberries (front) are still hanging in, and even produced one flower this week. The cucumbers (back) are doing great. I have to start drying the chives and parsley from our container plantings this week. The oregano is still slowly coming back but doesn't have a lot of leaves, so I'll leave that alone. All I can say about the pole beans is wow. And wow again. They've doubled in height in the last four days. We'll also start picking our radishes next week, as they're almost ready to harvest. No sign from the broccoli yet. These little newbies are probably the brussel sprouts I told my guy not to plant (I'm the only one who eats them, but he wanted to give me a treat.)

My guy loves his mother's Italian sausage pasta sauce, but I really don't. The first time I made it I had to use an entire bottle of olive oil to follow the recipe, which frankly made me gag every time I tasted the sauce. It takes two hours to simmer, too. Even thought I've gradually made a healthier version of it over the years, it's still loaded with fat that we don't need to be consuming at our age. Hoping to find an alternative, I started hunting around online. On a whim I tried this 20 minute sausage pasta skillet recipe , tweaking it a bit with chicken Italian sausage and using only two fresh tomatoes and adding 8 oz. of tomato sauce (most of the sauce ends up in the bottom of the skillet.) I also adjusted the amount of chili flakes and crushed fennel to about a quarter of what the recipe calls for to suit our personal taste. Turned out very tasty; my guy ate three full plates and told me not to make any changes at all. That is his highest endorsem...

I can't seem to shake off my intense attraction to purple in all shades lately. I bought a bunch of purple scrap fabric, and I'm already thinking of a quilt design with a purple/green/turquoise pallette (this is why I'm deliberately trying to work with different colors, even pinks -- if I didn't, I'd be making everything in purples. It was my mother's favorite color, so maybe it's a part of my grief process. Not sure. It doesn't make me sad; I just feel compelled to make things in this band of the spectrum. Do you ever get temporarily obsessed with a color?

I recently acquired three lots of some pretty vintage brooches. Two arrived here last week, and one is on the way. I'm going to use these in my first mini art quilt series. Stay tuned to see what I do with them.

For my own amusement I finally took the Myers Briggs Type Indicator Personality Test. My results were INTJ, which is apparently the rarest personality type among women. Most of what they say about this type fits me, although some of it makes me feel a little uncomfortable, too. Being labelled with words like mastermind and architect is flattering, but not especially applicable. I'm a decent problem solver and world-builder, I think, but only when it comes to fiction. As for the rest of life I imagine I'm just as clueless as the next person. Have you ever taken this test? What were your results? Let me know in comments.

Things are going pretty well with the second planting in our gardens. Our strawberries (the original plants from last year) are hanging in, although they don't much like the summer weather. The cucumbers will need a string frame to cling to pretty soon. Transplanting the original herb plants we wanted to continue kind of wrecked our oregano, but it's slowly coming back. The chives and parsley are thriving. We should start eating fresh radishes in a week or two. These are super crisp and juicy, but not too hot, so we love them. The pole beans are shooting up like crazy. I expect we'll be having these with Thanksgiving dinner.

My guy and I both like pot pie, and ate a lot of them when we were kids. It was a cheap meal Mom could pop in the oven and pass out as individual servings without a lot of fuss. I have many fond memories of the turkey pot pies Banquet used to make. Well, those days are gone now. While looking for something edible we've tried every single brand of frozen pot pie on the market, and they're all terrible. The quality has gone from meh to horrible with gristly meat, spotty veggies and tasteless gravy. I finally got fed up and stopped buying them, but we missed them. I started looking for a recipe that was easy so I could make my own (and control the quality of the ingredients.) Found one that is easy and delicious! Ha. I did tweak the recipe a bit: instead of two cups of carrots I used one cup that I diced fine, and added a diced large potato to make up the deficit. Instead of frozen peas I used a small can of LaSeur peas, which I prefer and my guy the pea-hater d...

Ten Things I Like About Fall Backyard Burns: We usually start up the fire pit in October. I can't eat s'mores any more, so toasting marshmallows is out, but those quiet, cold nights sitting and watching the flames are still wonderful. Baking: I always bake more in the fall because of holidays, birthdays and the general need for more substantial meals and snacks. I like baking. Keeps me out of trouble. Cooler Season: While summer will always be my favorite season, after a long, wet, hot one like we just had I really don't mind things getting drier and cooler. Walking the pups won't make my yard shoes damp and squishy, either. End of Hurricane Season: I'm able to relax a little once the storm season ends. A little. I kind of wonder if I ever really relax, though. I'm still checking our food and water supplies every month year-round. Oh, well. Halloween: I love handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, especially as it annoys some of the more ...

For the past year I wrote the exact same long sentence from memory every day in my journal. I didn't look back to see what it was, I just recalled it and wrote it down. It was also a random sentence versus a quotation, a line of poetry, etc. The point is, I wrote it 365 times to test my memory over the length of a year. After all that I went back and checked every entry, and turns out that I wrote it perfectly 364 times. I messed it up once, but I immediately realized it was wrong, struck out the error and rewrote it correctly. Why spend a year of my life doing this? Memory loss that affects day-to-day activities is an early sign of dementia. Although I'm at a higher risk for it than the average person (thank you, blood vessel-damaging diabetes) I'm not seriously worried about getting that on top of everything else; I was just curious. You guys are the first to hear about this little exercise. I don't talk about this stuff much. I have an established track...

I took this pic two days after we brought the puppies home. I took this one about a month and a half later. They're getting big. :)

Quilting and sewing with puppies means not focusing on the project as much as what the little ones are doing, which is why I screwed up the straps and outside stitching for Kat's Halloween treat bag. So now that it's all finished, I have to take it apart, make smaller straps, and resew it. On the plus side I think (once I fix it) it will look cool.

I lost my sunglass case last week, so I considered buying a new one. Then I remembered this little art embroidery piece, which I made from a magazine project but never did anything with -- just about the perfect size for a quilted case. I trimmed off the bottom of the piece to get it to the right size, and then grabbed some complimentary fabric and batting from my scraps stash. I handstitched a little quilt out of that, and once more remembered why I didn't like this project -- the fusible web holding it together made it hard to sew. But on the plus side, it made it very stiff and sturdy, which worked nicely as a case. I turned it outside in and sewed up everything but one end to finish the case. Came out nice. If you want to make a glasses case even simpler, find a nice-sized quilted pot holder that is a rectangle shape, fold it in half long ways, and stitch together. If it's already bound you don't even have to stitch and turn it, you can just run a st...

The long, hot, wet summer has resulted in a lot of lichen and moss growing on our trees. This is why I really have to watch the puppies and what they pick up in the yard. The deadfall with these growths is oddly gorgeous, even though they look like they come from another planet. I don't know why I'm so fascinated, but I keep taking pictures of the most interesting pieces I find. Weird, but beautiful. I need to embroider that somewhere. :)

I had to use my camera's flash to get a shot of Shadow to come out clearly, but here you can finally see his cute little face and pretty markings. :)

After cleaning out our little raised bed gardens we planted a few more veggies that will grow before the cold season starts. Here are the cucumbers sprouting in back of our strawberry plants. To keep our container herbs going my guy rigged up drig irrigation. In the second bed we've planted pole beans, radishes, broccoli and brussel sprouts. The beans and radishes are already going strong. I especially love the pole beans, so we planted an extra one in hopes of harvesting more.

I'm going to use these scrap and selvage pieces to make a mostly pink log cabin quilt. Why? Because they're pretty. Because they're not all pink, and the pink isn't hot or virulent. It looks Victorian. I like Victorian. Also, I've never made a quilt showing the selvages, which I think would look neat. The universe can collapse now. Thank you.

I went so far as to buy a UK edition of Someone to Cherish , Mary Balogh's latest Westcott novel, and after reading it I regretted that a little. I think there's a point in a long novel series when you have to stop trotting out all the main characters from the previous books for cameos, and you really must quit providing all their backstory, too. There are something like eight or nine couples now in this saga, and yep, they all show up in this novel (again) and we hear all about what happened with them (again.) Which is nice for new readers, I suppose, but how many new readers do you think are going to pick up the eighth or ninth book in a series? Honestly the backstoryitis took up like a quarter of the book this time, and seriously distracted me from Harry and Lydia's story. So that's my chief gripe. Someone to Cherish is a nice story, but it missed a lot of opportunities. This book featured Harry Westcott, the son of the bigamous Earl of Riverdale, who r...

I should have decided this last month, but the new puppies (who are my excuse for everything these days) took priority. Here's my clear and final answer on whether I intend to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year: I don't know. Probably not. I want to, but . . . . aka the same way I feel every year before NaNo. I'll probably decide on Halloween night again. I went on their wonky website to see if they posted this year's theme, and had the devil of a time accessing it. I finally had to reset my password just to sign in. Anyway, as of 9/8 there's nothing posted. Are you joining in, Theo? Added 9/9: Apparently they just put up the 2021 theme: Eh. It's not making my writer's heart flutter, but it's better than some of the past themes.

As threatened, I took some pics when we cleaned Beau's ear with the anti-fungal/anti-bacterial ear wash the vet gave us. To do this she uses a cosmetic pad. You soak the cosmetic pad with the ear wash first. You then use the pad like this to clean the ear. This is so much better than directly squirting the wash into the ear and having it drip everywhere, and far less messy. I think it's also more comfortable for the pup.

Our new fruit trees flowered, and now have little fruits on them. Mom's tree has probably a couple dozen. I hope they survive. Having fresh grapefruit I can go out and pick whenever I want this winter would be wonderful. Seeing these tiny fruits makes me remember my grandmother, too. She would pick grapefruit from the tree in our backyard and make English marmalade from them. Dad's orange tree had a couple baby fruits on them, but sadly one just fell off. The rest may do the same. The single orange that survived the transplanting is still okay, so maybe we'll have that one this winter.